On forgetting how to write for yourself (and learning all over again)
Sometimes you mine your journal for content and it obliterates your writing ability for a few years.
In 2019 I forgot how to write for myself.
I’ve been living in some form of writers’ block for the past six years. This is an obnoxious statement given the fact that I write professionally, but putting out 3-5 articles a week is an entirely different beast. There have probably been less than 20 occasions where I have written without an audience, real or imaginary, hanging over my words. It’s a stifling and entirely self-imposed problem.
From early 2018 to late 2019 I had near prolific writing output. This can be largely chalked up to my journals: dirty, sticker-clad books that I carried around like baby blankets and wrote in constantly.
By the time I got to college in 2019, journaling was an established part of my personality. But the truth is, I only picked it up after my high school got shot up in 2018. My feelings got really big and really internal all at once – they needed a home where I could confess freely.
Enter the moleskine. Well, at least enter the off-brand journals I got at any number of gun violence prevention events. I still have a stack of untouched books waiting to be christened. My favorite is a neon green Papa John’s Pride edition with a rainbow flag pizza slice on the front. One day she will become my most treasured item. I usually put a sticker to hide the obvious decals on the exterior.
My 2018 journal filled in a matter of months. A forest green, padded book with a massive 2018 decal on it to hide some corporate logo. From there, I moved to a brown leather book I got in New Zealand creatively embossed with the word “JOURNAL.”
Those journals were my haven. I would document my life religiously, hoping that some sort of healing or revelation would come out of the practice. I scribbled down such discoveries like my mental health is in a bad spot right now or I think everybody hates me.
At the time, the diaries were the only place I could be really honest. I was trapped under crushing expectations to be and do… a lot of things. Outwardly, I was a changemaker turning my grief into movement. I think mostly my grief wrapped up in a cohort of high school mental problems to create some sort of mega-feelings beast.
But into the journal it went. That kind of journaling is a sort of exorcism. Once the worst thoughts are words on the page they can exit your body and brain and live bound between covers forevermore. When I was a veritably insane high school freshman I would write down awful bad thoughts, cross them out and rip the page into tiny pieces before flushing it down the toilet.
Suffice it to say I had a habit of dealing (or not dealing) with my problems by writing about them. This intensified in college. My campus was full of strangers and I was more isolated than ever before.
I was experiencing what I call “every feeling I have is wrapped up in every other feeling I have” which created an interesting cocktail of feelings as I navigated a very emotionally charged time away from home.
Mostly, I was lonely. The journal was the only thing I could really talk to (this sounds devastating, I promise I’m not that much of a loser.) My baby blanket. I carried it everywhere. Sometimes just to add to my mythology and give me a reason to sit around waiting to be seen.
Then I joined a literary and debate society. This is also where I met my college boyfriend. He wrote beautiful prose. It was the first thing I liked about him. He had a poetic sensibility. The first time we talked was after I delivered a highly emotional piece about the shooting to the literary society. It was my first meeting.
He kneeled in front of me with a loaded look and told me he loved my piece. It was the first time I remembered my writing really resonating with anyone like that. People liked when I shared my feelings, they liked seeing the end result of always thinking about and writing about your internal life.
So I kept mining my diaries for prose. Then I started writing about my college boyfriend, as young people in love often do. I wrote trite turns of phrase about melodies and musings and compared our relationship to every love song. Classic 19-year-old shit.
Since he wrote skillful poetry, I tried my hand at the form. Then I pushed to hear his work. Then he pushed to hear my work. We’d crack open the spines of our respective moleskines and dole out paragraphs under the stars. We spent hours on moldy apartment-building patio cushions. It felt like the most romantic thing in the world.
I’ve always been drawn to a muse. Having one and being one. Reading back through diaries of years past, there’s a clear pattern: lament about being uninspired until I get a crush, then write every single word for the next few months about said crush. Like clockwork, the entries would thin out between paramours until I received a new muse (or felt the weight of another tragedy.)
That college boyfriend became my muse, obviously. I was inspired! But I needed to actually put that inspiration to the page. Lucky me, I wrote all the time in a little black journal I kept on hand.
There’s a clear writing shift around this time. On a sentence structure, my approach to the diary had changed. In 2018 everything was a confessional. I asked questions of the pages.
Journal, is it shitty of me to be annoyed?
I had stupid little revelations.
I think my favorite moments in life are those deep conversations with people I care about.
Compare that to fall 2019:
He brings out the firecracker in me that was once extinguished. He fans the flames I try to suffocate. His unrepentant enthusiasm for my spark lets me burn to new heights, bright with the promise of an audience who cares.
You don’t have to tell me it's dogshit. I know that. But who was I writing for? At the time, I credited this to emotional growth. But now that I can recognize both eras of writing as bad I get to judge it differently. In 2018 I was honest. Embarrassing, cringe, sure. But honest. I really did have these juvenile thoughts and questions. I wasn’t worried about being trite or unpoetic.
What I see now is the shift between an 18 year old using a journal as her friend and a 19 year old thinking her diaries would be published posthumously.
I don’t say this to blame myself. These were baby's first tries at creative writing. I was doing my best. How was I to know bringing my personal writings to the public would wreck my ability to be honest at all?
By taking the most private entries public I started censoring myself. I knew everything could make it into the world, so it wasn’t carte blanche on sharing anymore. There were things I should keep to the dark recesses of my little brain. Not things meant for a semi-public page.
Often, I catch myself thinking about the most impactful thing I read in 2019 – the same year my writing changed. Allison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? dealt plenty with questions of diary, analysis and recording life.
Bechdel fixates heavily on Virginia Woolf and her approach to diary. One quote from Woolf sticks with me today:
How would it interest me if this diary were ever to become a real diary: something in which I could see changes, trace moods developing, but then I should have to speak for the soul, and did I not banish the soul when I began? What happens is, as usual, that I'm going to write about the soul, and life breaks in.
Bechdel points out that she struggles with the demarcation between a diary as documenting the external life and internal world. This lingers in my mind. At some point, I stopped documenting the external life and withdrew to my internal one. Is this good? Who’s to say?
There’s another quote I’ve been grasping at for years, though I can’t remember the words or the writer. But I remember the feeling: write around the painful thing, not about it.
I took this far too literally. I didn’t understand at the time that this likely meant something far more nuanced, and decided to not write directly about my pain and emotion. I thought writing head-on about things was decidedly unliterary. So I stopped.
For lack of a better word, this fucked my writing. For years. It wasn’t until I became a journalist and unlearned everything I knew about writing that I could rebuild. My first editor broke down my prose and made me start over from the ground up. I’m a better writer for it.
Don’t get me wrong – the mental reboot didn’t make me a diarist again. My personal writing is tucked into notes app entries or wrought out into an essay for a potential audience. But it did show value in writing directly. I am not a poet, this I know now. I don’t really deal in metaphors. I can still be a good writer.
In 2024 I tried my hand at a writing and oration competition in Atlanta. I lost, but somebody told me after they loved how direct I was. Somebody else told me the piece was confusing, so they might cancel each other out. But it felt like I was being honest again.
That hasn’t solved the problem of writing for myself. But it has redefined it. I think I used to consider “writing for me” an issue of writing without an audience. Frankly, I don’t have the time to keep a diary. I don’t really want to lock anything away, either.
So now I am trying a new thing: Writing for me by writing about whatever the hell I want. I am my own muse, my own judge. Let’s hope I have something to say.
Basically, welcome to No Scar Tissue.
@Delaney Tarr ❤️
You are my Carrie Bradshaw